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Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Could You Mime That?
At the Cafe Signes in Paris, the staff wear beaming smiles, the service is faultless and there is no yelling from the kitchen. But if you want something to eat or drink, you are going to have to work out how to mime it -- most of the staff are deaf. (Finding the main idea, reading for specific information, comprehension, guessing meanings of words from context, true or false, role play, discussion, collocation.)Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Cleaning Up Their Acts
With its landfill sites almost full, Japan has launched a plan to halve the amount of trash it buries. Meanwhile, Ireland battles a price of economic success: a waste disposal crisis. From a third island nation, New Zealand, comes a possible waste management solution. (Waste management, environmentally friendly waste management systems, matching sentence beginnings and endings, listening for information, true or false, choose the best answer, using 'also', understanding a process diagram.)Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Pregnant Advice
Children of women who drank while pregnant show the effects as long as 14 years later in the form of stunted growth, US researchers said. (Effects of alcohol on physical development of fetuses, brainstorming, predicting from a headline, matching information, true or false, scanning, complete the sentences, role play, summarizing.)Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Let's Close The Town
Residents of a remote Quebec mining community have voted to shut down the town following the closing of a local copper smelter, the area's main employer. (Small towns and employment, comprehension, true, false or not given, before +- ing, role play, essay topic, discussion.)Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Birds of a Feather
Singapore is fighting an army of crows plaguing its high-rise apartments. Rome is battling swarms of starlings that swoop down on Rome's historic piazzas and baroque churches by broadcasting bird "distress calls'' over loudspeakers. (Scientific study, pests, proverbs, writing letters, relative clauses.)Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Turkeys Galore
Each Thanksgiving, Americans eat about 535 million pounds of turkey, and a turkey-cooking hotline gives advice to people with problems a trucker who needed to know how long to cook a turkey on the engine of his truck, and a Kentucky woman who panicked when her tiny chihuahua jumped inside a turkey carcass and couldn't get out. (Thanksgiving, holidays and festivals, synonyms, apostrophes, use of 'although' and 'even though'.)Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

The Show Must Go On... Please!
A world-renowned Hungarian pianist broke off his recital at Edinburgh's high-brow International Arts Festival until a cacophony of mobile phones, beeping watches and coughing faded away. (Music, entertainment, ballet, public noise, mobile phones, prefixes and suffixes, 'might as well have + past particle of verb'.)Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

True... or not?
This lesson is about a portable lie detector for sale in Korea. You can use it over the phone!
(Technology, Korea)
Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

How Good Is Your Nose?
This is about: a dog that has been trained to smell money; mechanical dogs that can smell land mines; and the high cost of a dog at the United Nations that can smell bombs. (Working dogs, dogs smelling for money, bombs and land mines, prepositions.)
Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

How Good are You?
A pair of social psychologists say that luckily, the truly incompetent may never know the depths of their own incompetence. (ability, overconfidence, incompetence, synonyms, modal verbs, narrative tenses)
Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Home Schooled Spelling Champion
A 13-year-old computer whiz who taught himself to read at the age of 2 won the U.S. national spelling bee with the word "succedaneum." (Spelling competitions, home schooling, adverbs.)Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Graveyard Shift
Italian researchers have found that shift work may not only make people grumpy, but it could also put them at a higher risk of heart disease. (Shift work, health, jobs, business, verb agreements, irregular verbs, simple past)
Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

For Better or Worse?
A study in California has shown that recently divorced and widowed men eat fewer vegetables, drink more alcohol, and are less likely to quit smoking than their married counterparts. (Health, lifestyle, marriage, conjunctions, word forms.)Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Don't Be Shy
Youngsters who are extremely shy can often overcome their anxiety with a combination of social skills training and the help of their more extroverted peers. (health, children, phobias, passive forms)Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Court Punishments
A 74-year-old grandmother to sew a quilt for charity in lieu of serving jail time. You be the judge. (Law courts, punishments, judges, crime, old age, age as an adjective.)
Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Another Risk
Blood transfusions may be able to spread BSE (Mad Cow Disease). The research uses sheep, so may not apply to humans, but it's a scary thought. (BSE, Mad Cow Disease, scientific research, health, word order)
Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

A Fishy Business
Sadly fish stocks recover far more slowly from overfishing than was previously thought.(The environment, overfishing, conservation, modal verbs - may and might.)Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Reading is Good for You
If you want to eat less fat, then read the labels on food packages. (Surveys, consumer habits, food labels, health, diet)
Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

Respect Please
A new law will require students to address teachers and other adult school employees as "ma'am" or "sir" and to use Mr., Mrs., Ms. or Miss. when calling them by name in the hope that this will contain youthful violence. (Schools, politeness, laws and punishment)
Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate

GM Food - Needed
An official from Nigeria says that African nations need access to genetically modified crops to boost food production, not lectures from "misguided" groups in more developed countries about the possible perils of the new generation of seeds: "To deny desperate, hungry people the means to control their futures by presuming to know what is best for them is not only paternalistic, but morally wrong."
(Food shortages, Africa)
Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate